In article . com,
MIG wrote:

Mike Bristow wrote:
The station. The CCTV cameras. When we wandered round Loughton
for a open house weekend, the control room was part office; part
cctv monitoring station; where the equipment that allowed local
control of various signalling equipment lived; where the communiction
between line controller and station happened; and where the tea was
brewed.

I don't really understand why any of this needs to relate to or be
located at a specific station,

CCTV contol is best done locally, as if trouble occurs then the
staff that saw it happen can jump up and deal with it.

The office is required in the station so that the station staff can
do paperwork; the alternative would be not to have paperwork...
which is an attractive thought, but rather unlikely.

The local control of signalling equipment has to be, er, local,
otherwise it wouldn't be, er, local. It's a backup system for the
central control, and probably isn't used very often. I would expect
it to only exist at stations which have sidings/points etc nearby.

There needs to be some communication between the line controller and the
station so that when problems occur at the other end of the line, then
the station staff can advise their passengers approprately.

but if it does and they are always
staffed, you'd think it would be better if people were more evidently
there to help people.

If there's two members of staff and one is in the office/control
room and the other is on platform one doing something or other...
then there won't be any staff visable in the ticket office.

While it's nice if staff are obvious, it's not going to be possible
to achieve that for suburban stations off-peak without spending a
lot of money on more staff, most of whom will be doing nothing most
of the time.

I couldn't understand why they didn't just open the ticket office and
simply serve all the people instead of taking several minutes per
person trying and failing to make a machine work.

Perhaps there were no available staff who were trained on the
machinery in the ticket office. In that case, the best use of the
available staff would be to help customers with the ticket machines
(except for the one being trained on the machinery in the ticket
office, of course).

--
I don't play The Game - it's for five-year-olds with delusions of adulthood.